Catherine Kellogg
The question of cohabitation, of an association with others, and what it means to share the world with those whom one has not chosen is what Arendt meant by plurality, and it implicates all of her political philosophy, from her understanding of justice, to loneliness and isolation, and to the risks that she saw confronting her world, that continue to threaten today. It is clear that there is a renewed interest in Arendt’s work. Indeed, in response to the Trumpocaplyse, according to The Guardian, The Origins of Totalitarianism became a bestseller.1 And so I begin this chapter on the importance of plurality to Arendt’s thought given the renewed interest in Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism and her great insights into thinking, action, and assembling in public. What Arendt set out to do in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism was, among other things, to provide a phenomenological account of authoritarian totalitarianism, an account that puts front and center the experiences of dispossession, dislocation, and isolation, which she saw as both the origin of totalitarian rule and its necessary consequence. Arendt identifies dispossession, dislocation, and isolation as precursors to totalitarianism insofar as isolation leaves human beings dominated by a sense of worldlessness and superfluity, prepared to surrender their capacity for thinking to the compulsory force of logic that drives totalitarian terror. By isolation Arendt meant the profound experience of being cut apart from the social fabric of civil and political life that she associated with the experience of modernity generally, with its tendency to hyper-individualism and mass society. As she said:
By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them. . . . While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. . . . Loneliness, the common ground for terror . . . is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses. . . . To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all.2
Arendt was particularly interested in its relationship to the remarkable ease with which some lives could lose their quality of being social and political and, in becoming stateless, also become rightless, because this experience of calamitous rightlessness was the result and the cause of totalitarian rule.
Arendt’s methodological breakthrough, as original as it was breathtakingly obvious after she said it, was that the referent for the great Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen was not the presumed human subject full of dignity and firmly attached to inalienable rights, but rather the human being, stripped of the qualities of legal and social personhood, and so infinitely exposed to power in its rawest form: violence. As she says, “The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human.”3 As she goes on to say, “The survivors of extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps could see . . . that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger.”4 Patiently and often chillingly, Arendt shows the transparency of the process by which people were prepared for the concentration and internment camps. Talking of the people as first stripped of a place to belong and of others with whom to act, stripped of all of the social, civil, and political textures of life, she described the process of preparing “living corpses” as coolly rational.5
The calamity she saw was not that the stateless and therefore rightless were “not equal before law, but that no law existed for them.”6 The only way that stateless people could come into contact with the law was by breaking it. Her analysis shows the law in the way that only dystopian novels tend to do: as force without right or legitimacy to back it up. In liberal democracies, we tend to think of law as being made up of both senses of the German “recht”—which is not just law or rule, but also “right” as in just. When law is stripped of the second sense of what is just, it is simply force or violence, and this is one of her greatest insights into the functioning of law under conditions of totalitarianism: what she meant by being made “superfluous to the world” is being made the object of the law, but not its subject. So we become superfluous to the world when dislocated and dispossessed because then we are no longer of it. Her phrase “superfluous to the world” gets at the condition of being without all of what it means to be human; being deprived not just of a place or a home in the world, but also of something to do with others in that world and of having a voice to think and speak with as you do that work.
Being taken from the social texture and forms of life leaves us not just dislocated but lonely. As she says,
Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others. . . . For the confirmation of my identity I depend entirely on other people; and it is the great saving grace of companionship for solitary men that it makes them “whole” again, saves them from the dialogue of thought in which one remains always equivocal, restores the identity which makes them speak with the single voice of one unexchangeable person.7
There are many examples we can use to speak about this experience: in this moment, perhaps the most apt is the experience of walking while black, or trans, or native. Being taken from the social texture, and from forms of life, is the very process that leaves us vulnerable to the law in its form as force without right.
In 1945, directly following the end of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt declared that evil had become the defining political and philosophical problem of the age.8 Fifteen years later, writing about the trial of war criminal Adolph Eichmann for The New Yorker, she declared that he was, “like the pirate in traditional law, hostis, humani generis [enemy of the human species].”9 What she signaled with her declaration that Eichmann was an enemy of the human species, and not, for instance, an enemy of the Jews, or an enemy of the newly formed state of Israel, was that the nature of his crimes could not be contained by the distinction between criminal and political categories that the entire notion of war crimes depends upon. Eichmann’s actions exceeded criminal categories in the sense that, despite his famous defense that he was merely “following orders,” he was not a common criminal who had breached the laws of a particular jurisdiction. At the same time, his actions also exceeded political categories in the sense that the extermination of an entire people is not included in the actions of a lawful enmity. While he was formally tried and subsequently executed for “war crimes”—for having breached the laws of war, those laws which deem what kinds of actions are legal for enemies—Arendt’s claim was that his actions did not accord with an association with others with whom there might be peace as well as war, and thus, while his punishment was appropriate, he was tried on the wrong grounds.
Thus, if in 1951, when she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt was still working with a Kantian understanding of radical evil, by the time she covered Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, she had become convinced that only goodness could be radical: evil by way of contrast, was shallow; it spread like scum over a pond, as she said. As she famously claimed, Adolf Eichmann’s evil was banal because he just simply refused to think. He refused to understand the implications of his own actions. For Arendt, if you are thinking, you will have to come home to yourself at midnight, like Richard the Third; you will find yourself confronted by your own thoughts and the consequences of your actions.
Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial was the focus of intense controversy, from the moment it was written, unabated to the current moment. For Arendt, the emptiness of Eichmann’s speech did not demonstrate evil: his use of clichés was simply a constant barrage of thoughtlessness. The shallowness of Eichmann’s evil could not be fixed or given depth by reason. Only through the experience of thinking, Arendt insisted, of being in dialogue with oneself, can conscience again be breathed into life. Thinking may be useless in itself; it may be a solitary activity, yet thinking is the precondition for the return of judgment, of knowing and saying: “This is not right.” By 1971, Arendt saw no evidence of a resurgence of thinking in the wake of atrocity and she believed that there had been a rupture in political thought after the Second World War.
Indeed, Arendt did not find Eichmann terrifying, but rather laughable; his most straightforward motive seemed to have been building his career—working his way up the SS ladder. It’s not that Arendt thought that Eichmann shouldn’t be executed, but she disagreed with the reasons put forward by the trial as well as the trial itself. All of this meant that the trial was one that stood outside of the possibility of justice. And besides, execution is precisely what Eichmann wanted: to be hanged in public and to enjoy his own execution so that he could believe himself to be immortal. Indeed, at the foot of the gallows he defied his judges, telling them that “we shall meet again.” He forgot that it was his own funeral, prompting Arendt to write: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught him—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-defying banality of evil.”10
The controversy about the publication of The New Yorker article and then the book began immediately, and it has never abated. Arendt herself responded to the continuing controversy about her Eichmann book in Responsibility and Judgment. She says:
To begin, I want to comment on the rather furious controversy touched off by my book Eichmann in Jerusalem. I deliberately use the words “touched off” rather than the word “caused” for the large part of the controversy was devoted to a book that was never written. . . . The controversy invariably raised all kinds of strictly moral issues, many of which had never occurred to me, whereas others had been mentioned by me only in passing.11
The tone of this text has been the source of furious controversy from the moment it first appeared in The New Yorker, until the present day. One such moment is when Eichmann claimed during the trial that, in implementing the Final Solution, he had derived this moral precept from his reading of Kant. He invoked “duty” to explain his own version of Kantianism. And Arendt writes, “This was outrageous on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgement, which rules out blind obedience.”12
As Arendt says, speaking (imaginatively) directly to Eichmann, “you and your superiors took as your own right the decision that they did not need to share the earth,” and so no member of the human race “can be expected to share the earth with you.”13 Indeed, the explicit attempt to annihilate some part of the population—Jews, Roma people, homosexuals, communists, and the disabled, among others—meant that the exercise of freedom Eichmann insisted on was genocidal. It was for this crime, the crime of not sharing the world that Arendt says, “this is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”14
For Arendt, thinking implicates each one of us in a “we.” Thinking is integrally related to the affirmation of plural cohabitation. We, as distinct I’s, are not sovereign; this is an illusion and a dangerous one. The “I” who thinks is part of a “we” and cohabitation with others we do not ever choose is a part of the human condition. To exercise a right to decide with whom to share the earth is to invoke a genocidal prerogative. For Arendt, those who fail to relate to themselves, to maintain a dialogue with themselves as one does in thinking and judging, fail to actualize as persons. A certain kind of speech is necessary for this actualization. It is silent but not without addressee. All thinking, no matter how solitary, carries the trace of social company.
When, in 1945, Arendt said that refugees represent a “new historical consciousness,” in that they have no interest in gaining a new national identity, she meant that this new form of consciousness is especially important today as older concepts like those representing the political actor such as “man” or “citizen” are falling by the wayside as the nation-state slowly declines.15 As she put it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the nation-state in the interwar period declined “from an instrument of law, to an instrument of the nation.”16 Thus, Arendt’s model of the individual meditating on their condition and living as a perpetual outsider of history means that the necessity of belonging to a nation-state has been the root of modern violence, and the origins of a modern kind of evil: the banal evil of thoughtlessness.
Dispossession, dislocation, and isolation renders human subjects into objects; as she wrote in Origins: “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or equality before the law and freedom of opinion . . . but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. . . . Only in the last phase of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly superfluous.”17
Notes
1 Zoe Williams, “Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: Lessons from Hannah Arendt,” The Guardian. February 1, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/01/totalitarianism-in-age-donald-trump-lessons-from-hannah-arendt-protests.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 466, 474; emphasis mine.
3 Ibid., 299.
4 Ibid., 300.
5 Ibid., 447.
6 Ibid., 295–96.
7 Arendt, Origins, 476.
8 Hannah Arendt, “The Stateless People,” Contemporary Jewish Record, April 8, 1945: 137–53.
9 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006), 261.
10 Ibid., 252.
11 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 17–18.
12 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136.
13 Ibid., 279.
14 Ibid.
15 Hannah Arendt, “Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” from Origins, 275.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 295–96.